To date, many media editing applications exist for creating media presentations by compositing several pieces of media content such as video, audio, animation, still image, etc. Such applications give users the ability to edit, combine, transition, overlay, and piece together different media content in a variety of manners to create and output a resulting composite presentation.
Some media content producers (e.g., movie studios, broadcast stations) require a particular type of content in a composite media presentation to be separate from other types of content. For instance, a movie studio may require the video content to be separate from the dialogue or music content. This content separation allows the movie studio to easily replace the dialogue content in a first language with dialogue content in a second different language.
To output separate content, several media editing applications allow their users to create multiple tracks and specify different output channels for these tracks. FIG. 1 provides an example of such a media editing application 100. The media application 100 includes a composite display area 105 that includes different tracks 110-125. As shown, the application's user has created several tracks with the media editing application, and arranged one set of clips (e.g., “Dialogue” clips) along one track, another set of clips (e.g., “Music” clips) along another track, etc. The user has also specified whether these tracks should be output to separate channels. In the example illustrated in FIG. 1, the user has specified that the track 115 (e.g., with three “Dialogue” clips) should be output to a first channel, while the track 125 (e.g., with two “Music” clips) should be output to a second channel.
There are a number of shortcomings with such media editing applications as described above. For instance, the media editing application requires its user to create multiple tracks for different output channels and arrange clips along these different tracks. This constrains the application's user as the tracks are used for outputting the composite presentation when they could be used for other purposes. For instance, each particular track can be used to edit clips, create transitions between clips (e.g., keyframing), define compositing order, etc.
As another example, in the track-based system as described above, the editing operations are intrinsically tied to output operations. That is, if a composite presentation was edited without initially considering different output channels, then the user may have to re-edit the composite presentation by creating additional tracks and rearranging the media clips along the additional tracks. Such re-editing can be time consuming, especially when there are many clips that are part of the same composite presentation.
In addition to the different output channels, the media editing application requires its user to know what type of content is included in each clip. The application's user may have to input descriptive names for different clips so that it is clear what types of content are contained in those clips. For example, the user may have to input a particular clip name that indicates whether the clip contains dialogue, effect, music, etc. Otherwise, one or more clips could be placed on a wrong track if the user does not know what type of content is included in each clip.